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Shehadeh: Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
Reviewed by Gregory Orfalea
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 38, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), p. 85
Recent Books

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, by Raja Shehadeh. New York: Scribner, 2008 (originally published by Profile Books, Great Britain, 2007). xxii + 200 pages. $15.00 paper.

I have been reading an astounding book. Although it is filled with political encounters-all the more powerful for having been literally stumbled upon-I believe it is a direct descendant of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and can best be understood as such, although it is set a century and a half later in the West Bank of Palestine, a place few Westerners know for its natural beauty.

Isn't Palestine only blood and rancor, an "issue"? Raja Shehadeh knows better. His new and best book to date, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, is a celebration of life in the meanest circumstances. At the same time, it is a step-by-step, hike-by-hike refutation of the major myths that have been perpetrated about Palestinian land and society for more than a hundred years. It is, by its very open heart and incisive eye, not only an answer to the darker effects of Zionism in the land of Shehadeh's birth, but a whole way of looking at the "other," an attitude of living we are very lucky to have voiced. By "we" I mean anyone, anywhere; from the perspective of revealing our common humanity, Palestinian Walks could very easily have been called, simply, Walks.

Thoreau famously proclaimed "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." Shehadeh's woods are the hills of the West Bank; he takes to them with vigor, sometimes with a heavy heart, sometimes with a light one. We are treated to six of his long walks over a 25-year span, often with his 500-year-old hometown of Ramallah as the starting point: to Harrasha, where he takes a nephew to a favorite lookout his uncle had built as a refuge, only to find a priceless chair his uncle had carved out of the rock toppled by some "dull-witted stone thief"; through a series of valleys and natural springs to ‘Ayn Qinya, where he and his wife Penny are shot at and nearly killed by soldiers ("Whether Israeli or Palestinian, soldiers look out of place in these hills, as perhaps they do on any hill, anywhere in the world"; when he finds out six years later they were Palestinian he is relieved-not by that fact, but by being "reminded that for every story there is an ending"); to the Dead Sea; to Jericho, sampling monasteries along the way; to Ras Karkar, crowded by Jewish settlements; to a stunning encounter with a machine-gun-toting settler in a gulch.

Shehadeh's six walks, or sarhas (from the Arabic "to roam freely"), take place chronologically, from the earliest, over the once-sacred, now profaned ground of childhood, to the post-9/11, post-second intifada stunner with the settler. Each sarha waxes and wanes with his experiences fighting the largely losing battle of a lawyer for Palestinians trying to hold onto their land. Each walk, in a sense, is a passage back and forth through a life, and each, no doubt, draws heavily on Shehadeh's touted diaries. The walks grow more elegiac as Shehadeh turns away from his legal battles and toward an intensive hunt in nature for emotional balance.

There are dozens of remarkable moments along the way. Shehadeh has revelatory, Thoreau-like passages that contemplate the meaning of life itself after one's spirit has been assaulted so often as to be broken; moments of tenderness about marriage and companionship; and, yes, moments that twine together nature and the political.

There's a passage about natsh that is my favorite. Shehadeh read it recently at a standing-room-only presentation at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace in Washington, DC. A kind of thistle common to the Ramallah hills-said to have been used to make Christ's crown of thorns-natsh "has gained great popularity" in Israeli military courts ruling on land expropriation: "Never has a weed been more exploited and politicized." On the one hand, an Israeli lawyer points out, "But Your Honor, the land is full of natsh." Meaning: If it isn't a desert-for us to redeem, of course-it's weeds. Shehadeh then introduces Rabbi Kook, a leader of the settlements movement, whose "identification [with] the land was so total he felt his own body torn." Shehadeh comments drily, "It was not clear whether the land in question was replete with natsh." Then he turns back to the path: "For now I was not going to think any more of Rabbi Kook and his body, or of Dani and his legal fetish for natsh. I was going to enjoy my walk." What a treat-the rhyme of fetish with natsh is complete.

Few can leach humor from deep tragedy. In that way, too, Shehadeh reflects Thoreau, who loved to sprinkle his earnestness with puns: "As for salt, that grossest of groceries." But Shehadeh's walks spiral ever downward, until the apocalyptic encounter with the young settler who, spotting him, has to choose whether to fetch Shehadeh's hat from a stream or his machine gun.

I will leave the reader to that discovery. Enough to say it is stunning-a distillation in a ten-page dialogue of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, terribly sad, and yet with Shehadeh's signature heart and vision.

The final freedom, perhaps, is how we orient ourselves to freedom being taken away. Palestinian Walks is not just the most important book on the Palestinian tragedy (and the most unusual) in recent memory; it is one of the finest evocations of the spirit of Thoreau in our time, the best close contemplation of a natural environment since Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a praise of the Earth and a final, mystical warning. It should be taught everywhere people still walk their way out of fear, out of the "one big concrete maze" Shehadeh found, one day, taking over his home.